We know the truth that the founding fathers and Lincoln meant

Seven score and 10 years ago, Abraham Lincoln urged upon his countrymen that their nation, under God, should have a new birth of freedom – and that government of the people, by the people, for the people should not perish from the Earth. The Gettysburg Address, as all the world knows it, invites incidental comment. Its brevity – 10 sentences – has been held up as a model for politicians, though with scant effect. The man who spoke before Lincoln that day had spent two hours delivering his 13,000 words, and had taken some trouble to weave in quotations from Milton and Byron, no doubt pleasing those of the 15,000 crowd who could hear him. It was courageous of Lincoln to speak at all, for he felt far from well, and fell sick afterwards, probably with smallpox. As it was, he gave all his energy to the speech and the successful resolution of the Civil War. He could not know he was to die at another’s hand within 18 months.

Greater than the circumstances of the address are its contents. Of course, it is literally untrue that “all men are created equal”, as the founding fathers had declared. But we know the truth that they and Lincoln meant: the equal value and dignity of human lives, things certainly worth fighting and dying for, as the British have shown more than once since, in alliance with their American cousins. If, at the time Lincoln spoke, democracy still had pejorative connotations in Britain, where aristocracy and monarchy counted in practice, subsequently democracy has become an inalienable good. That is why a democratic deficit, as visible in the workings of the European Union, is a scandal that must be righted. And the Americans have another lesson for us: they learn about the Gettysburg Address with a patriotism that resembles piety. Our national gift for humour and irony should never blind us to the deadly seriousness of well-observed truths.